Do You Really Need to Practice A Lot To Play Well?
Well, of course you may say. Why would anyone practice at all if you could play well without it?
You’re right in most cases. A player recently asked me if he would be mentally fragile if he didn’t practice for a while.
By mentally fragile he meant that wasn’t really confident about his game since he didn’t practice.
It’s logical, that if you don’t practice, you can’t play that well. Right?
NOT necessarily!
It depends how many years you have been playing before.
If you have been practicing tennis for many years (10 and more), then your body and mind are so well trained, that all the programs for ball judgment, timing, coordination and technique are so deeply ingrained that they will run without problems even you don’t practice much.
What you’ll lose is speed, strength and stamina but not the technique and other skills already mentioned above.
Why is this important to know?
So that you don’t limit your performance with your thoughts (and doubts) the next time you play after a long break.
It is very likely that you’d be affected by the lack of training if you haven’t been playing tennis for years. Your skills are still not totally automatic and will lose their accuracy over time.
But if you’ve been playing a certain sport for many years, it is possible to play at a very high level without much practice.
In fact, one of the reasons why I wrote this post is because today I played volleyball 7 years after I quit playing in 2000.
A friend invited me to play in a local tournament and I accepted since I just came back from Thailand to Slovenia and wanted to meet my old friends.
And luckily, my girl friend took a video of me playing today.
In the video below, I am the guy that receives the serve and then spikes the ball. Remember, I didn’t play volleyball for 7 years but before that I practiced 16 years almost every day for 2 hours.
All the technique, ball judgment, timing when to jump and many other skills are still there. I just cannot jump that high as I used to, cannot hit that hard and cannot move that fast.
But I can still play well and so can you if you have mastered your sport – tennis – even if you haven’t played it for years.
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December 20th, 2007 at 10:44 am
I believe you are right. Its good to know. It seems pretty obvious now that you talk about it.
Thanks
December 20th, 2007 at 4:45 pm
Played this morning, I was in the zone, and hitting great, serving good, and my returns were fantastic. Then all of a sudden, It was miss shots, poor timing, double serve, I lost concentration. I play with the same three old gentlemen, and we don;t rush the games, we play to keep active, but I am discontentated, with my play, I can find other to play with, but these three are more or less social. ‘But I still want to win even against them, I think if the old familarity problem, I know your game, you know mine, then all of a sudden, I started getting better do to your instructions, and I do well, when I follow them, I think I talk my self out of being better as we play, Oh well. Jack
December 21st, 2007 at 3:09 am
Hi Jack,
Great to hear from you! Yes, one has to know “thyself” and how to get out of mental trouble. This gives me good topic for my next article, thanks.